MARGARET BENSHOOF-HOLLER

Love and Hate in the Equality State

Cody, Wyoming

COLD WIND whips across Wyoming. The lonely whine as it blows through telephone wires magnifies the desolation of the "equality state" in winter.

On a bleak, cloud-darkened day, the wind chill cuts into the skin, sinks into the bones, fossilizes the souls of Wyoming's rugged individuals.

The kind of day when local men jump into their four-wheel drive pickups with gun racks and head off into the wilds to shoot some deer.

The kind of cold and frozen day when Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney lured gay student Matthew Shepard out of a bar in Laramie, beat him, then tied him to a fence post and left him to die in sub-zero temperatures last October.

The kind of day that Wyoming newspapers on New Year's Day proclaimed the murder as the state's major story of 1998. It prompted President Clinton to ask that the federal hate crime bill include crimes based on sexual orientation, gender and disability. The murder also led to a similar bill proposed in the Wyoming legislature.

Henderson's trial is set for March 22; McKinney's, for Aug. 9.

Prosecutor Cal Reruchals has announced he will seek the death penalty.

Most Wyomingites will tell you, "It was a terrible thing they did to that boy."

Their opinions are mixed about the death penalty.

I, like Matthew Shepard, was born in Wyoming. Its other name is "the Equality State" because women were granted the right to vote and sit on juries in 1869, many years ahead of the rest of the country. I was raised there, but I ran away from the wide open sky and mountains after I finished high school in the 1960s. I felt trapped by Wyoming's long winters. The cold usually begins soon after Labor Day and continues until April or May.

Wyoming legislators granted equality to women in the 19th century because they thought it might attract more of them to a state where human beings were in short supply. But when suffragists from the East went to check it out, they took one look at the terrain of southern Wyoming, got back on the train and headed out.

There are two types of women in Wyoming, an old-timer once told me. A "good woman" gets married. The other kind were "women of ill repute."

In Wyoming towns where religious conservatives thrive, many believe woman caused the fall of Adam. That kind of thinking is one reason I've never returned.

There are two types of freedom, I learned after leaving.

One provides wide open space to breathe freely. The other gives you a place where you can just be you. I was unable to find the latter until I left Wyoming. But nothing makes me feel more alive than when I return in summer and see an eagle soar over a mountain or hear a coyote howl at night.

But if you don't fit in the culture of the most sparsely populated U.S. state that's 90 percent white, if you are any other color, or an unmarried woman (like me), or a homosexual, you might have problems.

I have lived for 30 years in places like Jakarta, Madrid, Sweden and now San Francisco. Each time I cross the time warp that leads me back to cowboy hats and the wild West, I drink in Wyoming's wide-open spaces like water on parched lips. But I won't be staying.

Wyoming is a man's state. Short days, cold winters and isolation internalize the emotions. Small-town expectations limit people's ability to express themselves. The openness of the sky and plains ease my soul each time I go back to Wyoming, the same way they must have for Matthew Shepard when he returned to Laramie to study at the university.

Love along with hate. That is how I feel about the "Equality State," or so I tell myself each time I get on the plane to head back home to San Francisco.